The History of Chocolate as a Health Food - <AUTHOR> http://www.canadapharmacyonline.com/blog/index.php/The-History-of-Chocolate-as-A-Health-Food/ <comment><USER2> I've been enjoying Trader Joe's Pound Plus chocolate for years ..

... but just found out that it is one of many chocolates tested with positive results for lead and cadmium.

[http://www.asyousow.org/our-work/environmental- health/toxic-...](http://www.asyousow.org/our-work/environmental-health/toxic- enforcement/lead-and-cadmium-in-food/)

If this is true, i'm in deep trouble :(

<comment><USER3> I find it odd that given that it's their own study they don't actually provide it. If this is a case of, "We did our own study. No... it's not peer reviewed. No... you can't see it. Just trust us, we did a good job." then I'm not really inclined to give it much credence.

I'm also a bit concerned with their name-and-blame approach. Even in their FAQ they surmise that it is likely that contamination came as a result of agricultural processes. Hershey's, for example, must source it's chocolate from just about everywhere. It's a BIG company. So, if Hershey's chocolate is unsafe, I've got to think that _all_ chocolate is unsafe.

My internal pessimism make me think that this is more likely a case of an environmental group using whatever means it can to cause alarm in the populace and try to force changes in agricultural practices. What is rather unfortunate is that such tactics simply polarize opinion. It will make it more difficult to sway the opinions of those they need to convince because nobody will trust them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I find interesting is how Western marketing of chocolate changed sometime in the 70's and took off in the 80's[1] to become a taboo indulgence, largely directed at women as a substitute for unrequited sexual desire. This was possibly done as a way to stem the loss of sales due to rising anti-sugar sentiment. [2]

[1] [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=decadent+choco...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=decadent+chocolate&year_start=1970&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3)

[2] [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=unhealthy+suga...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=unhealthy+sugar&year_start=1970&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is blog-spam</comment>


Summly shutting down, better alternative comming soon  - <AUTHOR> https://www.keenskim.com/static/KeenSkim_iPhone_app.htm

<comment><USER2> 1) The link does not talk about Summly shutting down, SOURCE? 2) The linked pages says "a clone of Summly is coming soon, give me your email address" - hmm, NOP, you gotta fight harder to get mine 3) You're not bringing any value with this link, why even put it on HN? 4) your title: comming soon, it's only one "m" 5) Thanks for wasting our precious time</comment>


File manager nnn v2.9 – simpler controls, smarter workflows - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jarun/nnn/releases/tag/v2.9 <comment><USER3> I always appreciated the raw performance of nnn.

Every action is ridiculously instant, even over remote ssh sessions.

Kudos for making a truly fundamental tool :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the appreciation!

Why let the tool block you when you can use the time more productively? So we thought. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This release was driven by simplification. We wanted to make nnn much easier to use than the earlier versions. Also, it was about time we froze the keybinds. We also reduced the number by re-designing several workflows.

Users now have more control over plugin execution or commands run as plugins. We have combined some plugins too. Some were removed now that non-shell interpreted commands can be run as plugins directly.

The Wiki got richer too! Take a look around.

From the release notes:

      - user pain points addressed
        - all keybinds and options reviewed by the team and frozen (see #422)
        - reduced number of keybinds
        - greatly improved help screen readability
      - `nuke`: sample opener (CLI-only by default) and plugin
      - fast line redraws instead of full screen refresh
      - auto archive handling by extension (see config `NNN_ARCHIVE`)
      - Lead key simplified to bookmark key (b or ^/)
      - single key to toggle order (t or ^T)
      - <USER2>
        - `.cbcp`: copy selection to system clipboard (internal, program option `-x`)
        - `.ntfy`: show noti on cp, mv, rm completion (internal, program option `-x`)
        - `autojump`: navigate using autojump
        - `upload`: paste text files to http://ix.io, upload rest to https://file.io
        - all fuzzy plugins modified to support both `fzf` and `fzy`
      - more control on plugins
        - prefix `-` to skip directory refresh after running (cmd as) plugin
        - suffix `*` to skip confirmation after running cmd as plugin
      - indicate range selection mode with `*`
      - list keys at bookmark and plugin key prompts
      - visit to pinned dir like bookmarks (Bookmark key followed by ,)
      - toggle executable (key *)
      - show mime along with file details
      - more special keys at empty filter prompt:
        - apply the last filter (^L)
        - toggle between string and regex (/)
        - toggle case-sensitivity (:)
      - retain filter on Esc, Up, Down
      - show filter details when filter is on
      - remove option to run filter as cmd on prompt key (can be disruptive)
      - program options
        - option `-x`: enable notis and copy selection to system clipboard
        - option `-g`: regex filters (string filter is default now)
        - option `-Q`: quit program without confirmation
        - option `-s`: load session
        - option `-n`: start in nav-as-you-type mode
        - option `-v`: version sort
        - option `-V`: show program version
        - option `-A`: disable dir auto-select
      - ISO 8601 compliant date in status bar
      - ported to Haiku OS
      - sort only filtered entries (to avoid directory refresh)
      - fix `getplugs` to install hidden files
      - fix several selection issues (see #400)
      - fix detail mode not restored on loading session
      - fix symlink to directory not auto-selected
      - fix regex error on partial regex patterns
      - fix symlink not shown if `stat(2)` on target fails
      - fix flags when spawning a CLI opener as default FM
      - fix issue with stat flag on Sun (no support for `dirent.d_type`)
      - fix current file in current context not saved correctly in session
      - signed source distribution on release
      - simplified debugging with line numbers in logs</comment>


AT&T Launches 3G MicroCell Site - <AUTHOR> http://wifinetnews.com/archives/2009/09/att_launches_3g_microcell_site.html

<comment><USER2> This is significantly important for those of us who'd consider an iPhone, but can't buy one because it doesn't work at home. I actually prefer this to a UMA solution, as the model of phone is irrelevant... I fail to understand, however, why this is limited to a particular test market. Shouldn't it be available wherever people have a good broadband connection (such as cities with - ironically - Verizon's FiOS?)</comment>


IOS Developers, It's Time To Ditch ASIHTTPRequest - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gowalla/AFNetworking

<comment><USER2> Somehow, I don't think I'm going to be ditching a well-maintained library I've been using for over 2 years that's integrated with all of my code at this point for a 2 month old project at version 0.3.0. Especially since there's nothing that stands out on what this library does (if anything) better.

Give me a nice blog post with some of the details on how this makes my life easier or more productive compared to ASIHTTPRequest and I'll think about it. As it is, it's just Yet Another Networking Library.

<comment><AUTHOR> Point taken; sensational headline is sensational.

ASI is a respectable library, certainly. It's been around for a long time, and it does everything you could possibly conceive of. Problem is, for most people, it does too much, and as a result, doesn't do anything particularly well.

AFNetworking does 2 things really well: API requests and image loading. 80% of the time, this is all that's necessary. For when it isn't, AFNetworking is small, understandable, and encapsulates most information in familiar Foundation classes (eg. NSURLRequest), which makes it much easier to extend than ASI.

It's a ways off from having the maturity of ASI, but I see a lot of promise in AFNetworking's design, and I'll do what it takes to keep improving it. Keep a look out for a blog post and better documentation in the coming weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> FWIW, Apple has stated that developers should not develop libraries that use the "first two capital letters are a namespace" paradigm, as you are just asking for a conflict with a future Apple-supported library. Like identifiers beginning with _ in C, [A-Z]{2} is "reserved".

(Yes: I, myself, am an offender here, but I've been careful in all new code, and even MobileSubstrate has been adding new symbols using "Subtrate _" instead of "MS_ ".)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm well-aware of that, too. But it was too tempting to do a NextStep- style vestigial prefix (Gowalla was previously named Alamofire, hence AF). Fingers crossed that Apple doesn't release "Apple Framework" anytime soon.</comment></comment>


Have you ever had SSD failures in your PCs? - <AUTHOR> How often has it occurred to you? What type of failure was it? Were you able to recover your data? <comment><USER2> I've had in the neighborhood of a hundred fail in servers at work. With two models (different manufacturers) a large number of drives failed within the first weeks of use. The other model fails randomly in our systems with raid controllers and sas expanders, possibly connected to a firmware issue on the ssds. In any case, the failure mode is the same -- the disk disappears from the bus, never to be seen again. The failure rate is much less than when we ran similar number of conventional hard drives, but the failure mode is much worse. We don't have a particularly high write rate, so none of the failures were connected to media wearout (to my knowledge)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had two SSDs fail in ~5 years.

One went into read only mode, and I could copy all the data to a replacement drive (I think - it's possible there's corruption in files I haven't noticed).

Recently one I bought in 2016 failed hard. Was working fine one day, next reboot the machine didn't even recognise it had the drive plugged in. (I also didn't lose any data, because I don't trust _any_ drives, and have multiple backups of it...)

The puts me at a 66% failure rate over ~5 years for SSDs in my personal machines. I don't recall a spinning rust drive failing in that time, and I have quite a lot more of those in service.

</comment><comment><USER4> Although personally I've never had it happen, I work closely with our support team who handles these issues. It happened to around 5% of staff towards the 4th year of use and about 100% more on the 5th year. Majority shut off and never came back on. A small percentage were able to turn on and we could retrieve all the useful data after a clone. Thankfully we have a policy that critical things should never be keep local.

</comment><comment><USER5> No actually save for a freind hamfistedly managing to snap the sata connector on an OCZ drive some years ago ive yet to actually have one fail and my oldest one in regular use is about 6 years old

</comment><comment><USER6> In a PC, no. In a server, yes... About half a dozen of them. Later determined they were part of a defective batch from Kingston. They just stopped working. No recovery of data was achieved.

<comment><USER5> Ouch i hope you had mixed drives in a raid, its things like this which are the reason i make a point of mixing disks up a little in an array, its never happened to me but ive heard enough stories in the past to be prepared</comment></comment>


I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC - <AUTHOR> https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/im-married-to-an-emergency-room-doctor <comment><USER2> Not an ER doc, but a doc in long term care facilities which have been hit particularly hard. Fortunately things have slowed down considerably now, but at its peak it was absolutely nerve racking. There's an element to this pandemic which many people working in healthcare have felt. We see patients fall sick often, and we see them die often, although this was at an near overwhelming scale. But what we don't see often is our own colleagues falling sick and, in some cases, dying. This adds a level of despair that I personally had never experienced before, and adds to the stress of the job. Which is why when it is written off by some as nothing more than a bad flu season, I get upset. This is something worse, and despite all the research that's been done in a short time, still something we don't fully understand - and something that is not over.

<comment><USER3> This is what I thin many forget when they speak against lockdown and for "heard immunity" \- that this would not only result in a huge ammount of unnecessary deaths, but also pretty much wear out if not outright kill a signifficant part of medical personel.

It's basically condemning them to working nonstop for months if not years, watching people die all day long & being in infection danger at all times while at work.

And you can't replace all the people that burn out, get ill or die quickly - training medical professionals takes many years.

<comment><USER4> I think it is more complicated than that.

Almost all states very early on had some level of 'lock-down', stay at home order, or what have you. This has limited movement of people, and as a side effect, or maybe even direct order from governors, closed down/ limited many business. Including hospitals.

Hospitals in America, believe it nor not, are for profit businesses. It is un- intuitive, but many of them are in serious financial trouble, despite the influx of Covid-19 patients. At a cursory level, I think most people would assume the hospital business is booming, but this assumption couldn't be more wrong.

At this point, nobody wants to go in for routine examinations or non-emergency procedures. For-profit hospitals (almost all of them are) as a business, depend on providing these non-emergency services/ surgeries/ procedures. Hospitals across the country are laying off health-care workers en-masse.

So it is not correct to imagine all hospitals are running at full capacity, and burning out their workers. In fact, many health care professionals are drawing unemployment at this point.

I know this is doesn't make sense at the surface level, but it is something we all need to consider when continuing to advocate for lock-down or stay at home strategies. Our economy depends on movement of people/ goods/ services. That includes hospitals. I wish there was more serious discussion about this, and how we keep things moving as much as possible, while also protecting one another from spreading the virus.

Lock-down alone is not an solution. If your areas hospitals are at risk of reaching capacity, for sure close it down. But almost nowhere in America outside of NY/NJ is there a risk of that right now. We've tried it for a while, but now we have more understanding. Now I want us to re-imagine how we can continue a life of movement, and also reduce risk of infection.

<comment><USER5> _> At this point, nobody wants to go in for routine examinations or non- emergency procedures. For-profit hospitals (almost all of them are) as a business, depend on providing these non-emergency services/ surgeries/ procedures. Hospitals across the country are laying off health-care workers en-masse._

Nitpick: Over half of US hospitals are nonprofits or government owned [1] though I believe hospitals are vastly outnumbered by private clinics and independent practices. Doesn't change your overall point - even the hospitals run by governments, the Catholic church, and other institutions have budgets and are watching their main incomes disappear without much hope for the near future.

[1] [https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us- hospitals](https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals)

<comment><USER6> While factually true, this does not defeat the point: those non-profit and public hospitals rely on paid procedures to pay their employees. And yes, those employees are furloughed and laid off en masse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recorded a podcast episode with my brother-in-law, a New York City surgeon, that has become one of my most downloaded. He talks about not knowing important information early, the challenge of going between surgery and home, but most of all, seeing the possibility of having to triage between who might live or die.

We cover non-pandemic stuff too.

[https://joshuaspodek.com/guests/michael-turner-dds- md](https://joshuaspodek.com/guests/michael-turner-dds-md)

</comment><comment><USER8> The way things are described make the doctors sound powerless. I've been frustrated by the lack the information on the usefulness of hospitals. The impression I've gotten is that they cannot do much, and if they would go as far as intubation, you're highly likely to die even with intubation.

<comment><USER9> I have never admitted to a hospital in the US but have heard stories of other folks who have been. I just get a feeling that once you are admitted in a hospital nobody has any power including yourself. Everything is taken over by the "system". This is my biggest fear why I would never want to be hospitalized.

<comment><USER10> It actually benefits you to have a doctor in the family who is there navigating and talking to the doctors. The doctors are more receptive to each other and listen carefully. Otherwise you are just a number. And the doctors won't try so hard on patients who really don't have any understanding of medicine in the first place.

<comment><USER11> My wife went to the ER (in Manhattan) with septicemia a week after giving birth. She was left lying on a stretcher for 17 hours without as much as water to drink before they finally "found" a room for her. (Thankfully she recovered.)

A few months later, a friend who works at the hospital told me: I wish you had called me, I could have gotten you a room. And I thought: this is just like a third world country, where you need connections to get basic care.

<comment><USER12> You are lucky. People in Quebec hospitals are left in hallways permanently, due to space issues - even before covid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > I haven't hugged my family in over two months — anything to keep them from > contracting a virus that could kill them.

It could but they look fairly young and as long as they've no comorbidities they'll be fine.

<comment><USER14> It's incredibly true. We know coronavirus is only really dangerous to the elderly and those with weakened immunity systems.

So why aren't we focusing all the attention and effort on protecting the most vulnerable, instead of spreading misinformation like "COVID doesn't discriminate" (it does) and panicking over schools while sending confirmed positive patients back to nursing homes?

<comment> J-dawg I agree - this kind of misinformation is so widespread now. It seems completely counter productive.

The other bit of widespread misinformation is the 2m/6ft distancing thing. It's just an arbitrary number.

Weirdly the fearmongering makes me feel like being _less_ careful, not more. The way I see it, if COVID is really so contagious that I'm likely to catch it from a stranger's exhaled breath as I pass them in the street, then I'm guaranteed to catch it eventually, so what's the point?

I'm sure it can technically be transmitted in this way, but what's the actual probability? Tiny enough to not be worth worrying about, I expect.

<comment><USER15> Tiny exposure to covid (by passing somebody on the street) is exceptionally unlikely to make you sick, but it will help your immune system recognize the enemy. This builds partial immunity and if you get exposed for real at some later point your immune system will be able to kick into gear right away.

<comment><USER16> Has this been demonstrated? Is this true? Is this really how the immune system works?

<comment><USER15> Yes, for instance in this 2015 study on influenza: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4342672/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4342672/)

Higher initial dose results in worse outcomes. Low dose still helps build immunity. Covid19 should be assumed to work like other RTIs.

(This is also why obsessively washing your hands and cleaning your house with bleach isn't a good idea, because being in too sterile an environment harms your immune system.)

<comment><USER16> Wow, conducting this study (and the IRB review) must have been great.

Hm, okay, at first I just saw the very linear response and wasn't sure how that translates low dose still helps build immunity, but then went back and read your comment up thread, which captures it better: the partial sickness gives partial immunity, thus "priming" the body for the full-blown thing.

Though getting the active transmission rate down could be more important in some places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reading the title I thought the topic was a marriage with an Entity Relationship document

<comment><USER18> lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > _When Alex finally gets home, he takes his scrubs off outside our front door > and stuffs them into a plastic bag that he ties off tightly. He takes his > hospital clogs off and leaves them outside, along with his backpack and > coat._

Why do doctors and nurses walk around outside in their hospital scrubs? It was unsanitary even before COVID and I just don't get it. How hard can it be to change into street clothes before leaving the hospital?

I see nurses and doctors in scrubs on public transit, in coffee shops, cafeterias... they are either taking whatever illnesses were in the hospital outside, or taking the dirt and grime of the outside world into the hospital. It's baffling that this behavior is so normalized that it's described as heroic in TFA.

<comment><USER20> It's actually not easy; not every place has facilities for that. Wife is a nurse, and we went through this discussion of the best process when she was an ICU nurse during the Ebola scare five years ago.

Remember too, sometimes folks are on the way _to_ work in their scrubs, not necessarily leaving work.

<comment><USER19> What "facilities"? We're talking about _changing clothes_. Shower curtain ought to be enough! And the point about going to work in scrubs is also bad: scrubs should be as much about keeping stuff _out_ of the hospital as _in_.

If a neighborhood yoga studio can provide a place to change, pretty sure any healthcare facility can too.

<comment><USER5> When's the last time you saw a yoga studio the size of an average hospital? Most hospitals have staff numbering into the hundreds or thousands with 24/7 operations [1]. We're talking large locker room facilities all over the place with many departments getting their own, especially after COVID, which themselves become central points for disease spread since shift changes aren't evenly spread out.

I don't think it's a bad idea to make big investments into such infrastructure now but I think it's completely reasonable it wasn't a priority before.

[1] The average hospital with 50 to 99 beds has a FT+PT staff of about 400 ( beckershospitalreview.com/hospital-management-administration/50-things-to- know-about-hospital-staffing.html ) and half of all hospitals in the US have under 100 beds.

<comment><USER21> Most bathrooms in hospitals are private.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> the tldr is: being a doc in NYC right now is a high stress - maybe battlefield like scenario. Lots of patients, lots of death, hard to cope with a routine like that.

<comment><USER10> Tldr artistic writing like that? And then miss out all the details? Cruel.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you donate your time to charity? If so, Which one? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [http://www.Onebrick.org](http://www.Onebrick.org)

</comment><comment><USER3> HOBO</comment>


You only need to succeed once - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/excitingrole/you-just-need-one-win-4197a60d7bb3#.ua804szb3 <comment><USER2> Few worthwhile efforts are ever successful on the first attempt.

Failures are essential to progress. They provide an improved understanding of the context and a guide to achieving a better outcome. Failure has nothing to do with guilt.

Failure is just another metric.</comment>


It is exactly what you'd expect from OpenBSD now unfortunately - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/688658/ <comment><USER2> Half of the article is sensationalist and bashes OpenBSD for bashing's sake. The devs are right about 90% of the time; they'd rather do something right than jump on the bandwagon and ride the hype off the cliff.

Yes, that's exactly what you'd expect from OpenBSD, now, in the past, and hopefully for many more years in the future. Years and years and only two remote holes.

Thank you OpenBSD!

</comment><comment><USER3> OpenBSD is a bit bipolar. The rationale behind http was that since CAs demonstrated[1] that every CA can't do their job all the time it was more appropriate to let users use other methods of authenticating their installs. So you are supposed to check hashes via different networks, ask other people to verify hashes, etc. Many people though just want isos and don't care if it's coming from a source that works only 99.999% of the time so now they got that.

GPG is also way over-engineered for its most common use case, so signify was made to unburden existing OpenBSD users from unnecessary risks. But again it wouldn't hurt them if they signed isos with both GPG and signify. It's not like Linux isn't without a laundry list of faults though.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar)

</comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr: article on linux news site criticizes bsd</comment>


Google's DeepMind made 'inexcusable' errors handling UK health data, says report - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/16/14932764/deepmind-google-uk-nhs-health-data-analysis <comment><USER2> From the article, "US tech giant made "inexcusable" errors in terms of transparency and oversight when handling sensitive medical information."

That makes it sound like this is all more about the policies and agreements on how the data would be handled rather than, say, anything incorrect with the DeepMind algorithm.

<comment><USER3> Yes, here are the complaints from the referenced report ...

1) We do not know––and have no power to find out––what Google and DeepMind are really doing with NHS patient data, nor the extent of Royal Free's meaningful control over what Google and DeepMind are doing;

2) Any assurances about use of the dataset come from public relations statements, rather than independent oversight or legally binding documents;

3) The amount of data transferred is far in excess of the requirements of those publicly stated needs, but not in excess of the information sharing agreement and broader memorandum of understanding governing the deal, both of which were kept private for many months;

4) The data transfer was done without consulting relevant regulatory bodies, with only one superficial assessment of server security, combined with a post- hoc and inadequate privacy impact assessment;

5) None of the millions of identified individuals in the dataset were either informed of the impending transfer to DeepMind, nor asked for their consent;

6) The transfer relies on an argument that DeepMind is in a "direct care" relationship with each patient that has been admitted to Royal Free constituent hospitals, even though DeepMind is developing an app that will only conceivably be used in the treatment of one sixth of those individuals; and

7) More than 12 months into the deal being made, no regulator had issued any comment or pushback.

[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12553-017-0179-...](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12553-017-0179-1)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: 10k+ node _windows_ cluster in AWS? - <AUTHOR>

For testing purposes, I'd like to know if anyone has successfully created, controlled, and torn down clusters of 10,000 nodes or more of Windows instances in AWS?  Or in other cloud providers?<p>I'm looking to setup a large scale QA test that will drive Windows client traffic (think Outlook, CIFS file sharing) to a data center installation. <comment><USER2> If you're looking to experiment -- I think the best answer is talk to AWS support as this isn't a normal case that is allowed by AWS accounts.

Check out [http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run...](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run_in_Amazon_EC2).

To quote it: " You are limited to running 20 On-Demand or Reserved Instances, and running 100 Spot Instances per region. Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large instances are limited to running 8 On-Demand instances per region and Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large instances are limited to running 2 On-Demand instances per region (Currently cc2.8xlarge and cg1.8xlarge instances are only available in US East (N. Virginia)) "

However, these are the default limits -- AWS will up your account limits by quite a bit if you just ask. This said, max I've ever seen AWS approve was 400 on-demand instances per one region (I think this means 2800 instances total over 7 regions... never saw if the limit applied to all regions). Also, likelihood of having a 10000 spot instance request fulfilled is probably near zero if I were to guess even if they let you make a request that big without first clearing it with them.

I take it you're also familiar with the cost of running that? The absolute minimum you could possibly be charged using small instances is $1,200 -- partial hours are rounded up.

<comment><AUTHOR> My rough estimate was ~$14,000 for 24 hours of 10,000 windows instances: 24 hours of 10,000 non-persistent on-demand Windows micro instances in Amazon West: $7200 Assume 0.5 mbit/sec average to each instance over 24 hours (105TB): $5020 AWS data rate from aws is currently 0.

If I understand their pricing, cyclecomputing adds a 20% upcharge: $1440

<comment><USER2> I'm unfamiliar with the HTC/HPC space but I'd highly suggest running with just a few micro windows instances with some kinda dummy job to verify they work well enough for your purposes. For what I've tried to use them for (website + database type of demo machines) they've been just about unusable/ way too unresponsive to get much done. Linux micro are good enough for most stuff I need but not windows ones.

While not that big a charge relatively speaking -- you'll need to include EBS as well since micros only have EBS \- EBS space (10c/GB/month) -- I'd imagine 10GB minimum per machine though AWS provided instances have 30GB. \- Est: (10,000 machines * 10GB * $0.10) / 30.4 (avg days in a month) = 328.95 \- EBS IO (who knows? depends on what you do) -- rate is 10c/ 1 million IO ops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was at Super Computing 11 this past November.

I haven't done it personally. But I saw a demo at the CycleComputing booth that looked pretty slick.

They've brought up to 30,000 linux nodes. Not sure if they have an offering for windows or azure.

There are entire companies being built to solve this problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - I saw the ars article about cyclecomputing, and was researching them.

<comment><USER3> I followed cloud pretty closely at the conference.

My biggest take away was that: if I'm going to do public cloud... I'll contract out a company to deal with the details of bringing up the cluster/images.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> An AWS (support) forum may be a better resource. I don't see why this wouldn't work - maybe the Amazon guys would appreciate a heads-up, though.</comment>


Cable is building apps for your TV - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/cable-is-building-apps-for-your-tv-slowly/

<comment><USER2> Oh, only over a decade after the technology industry? The only thing large telecoms are good for is price fixing. The cost of a text message is nowhere near 10 cents. In a free market, the price wold never stay so far inflated. We should break all telecoms up into much smaller companies. The competition would ensure that we see some real innovation and fair prices for the consumers.

<comment><USER3> it doesn't require anything so proactive. simply remove the regulations that prevent competition and the current players will crash and burn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I share the same skepticism towards telecom as Lawrence Lessig. In short: they've always been slow to innovate, they only look after their bottom line, and they stifle innovation.

Comcast will not build anything before hackers get to it. Comcast will do what they've been doing all along: protecting their profits. I'll be surprised if they finish this open platform and if it doesn't suck.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article calls the iPhone an "open system." That doesn't give me warm and fuzzy feelings about the author's knowledge.

<comment><USER6> Compared to "OpenCable", the iPhone _is_ open.

<comment><USER5> I lack warm and fuzzy feeling for _all_ of the above, then!</comment></comment></comment>


Brexit uncertainty means UK is uninvestable - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/brexit-uncertainty-means-uk-is-univestable-bernstein-says-2018-11 <comment><USER2> It's a strong claim to state that increased variance causes "uninvestability".

It _might_ be fair to say that what is instead occuring is that the market hasn't revalued appropriately.

Not enough upside / "safety margin" to account for the increased risk.

Equally though it could be said that this is a statement about the market's opinion of the actual risk involved - e.g. it's all going to actually be fine.

Whilst it's still impossible to buy real estate in London for less than 10x the median salary I find claims that "the UK is uninvestable" extremely suspect. Where are all the sellers?

<comment><USER3> The number of homes for sale has dropped to a decade low (lowest since the 2008 financial crisis). And property prices in London have dropped.

The uncertainty around Brexit means that people don't want to buy, nor do they want to sell at a loss until they're sure that they have to count it as a loss. There's a lack of liquidity.

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/oct/05/uk-house- pr...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/oct/05/uk-house-prices-fell- sharply-in-september-amid-brexit-wariness)

Edit:

As I point out in a comment below, if you're a foreign investor investing the day before the referendum, the exchange rate along means you lost 14% of your investment so far.

<comment><USER2> > nor do they want to sell at a loss until they're sure that they have to > count it as a loss.

I mentioned this as a possibility in my comment. Prices have not been adjusted because people don't actually believe, on the whole, that Brexit means anything material.

> And property prices in London have dropped.

By a low single digit percentage, last year, primarily at the top end of the market.

If you're trading on leveraged derivatives that might be relevant. There are approximately zero actual individuals affected by a change of that magnitude.

As I said, when we see real hard and fast falls, then I'll be interested. Right now it's just bluster on all sides. All talk, no action.

I ask - politely - if you're going to reply with a nitpick, and state that actually it's 2%, or 3%, not 1%, or something - consider what this actually means. Brexit is being spoken about everywhere as some sort of hugely important world-breaking apocalyptic event, not a very slight adjustment over decades.

The single largest contributor to quality of life for every single person I know is quality and availability of housing.

Everything else is linked to that - we don't need food banks because people can't afford food, we need food banks because all the money disappeared into a rent hole first.

<comment><USER4> >Prices have not been adjusted because people don't actually believe, on the whole, that Brexit means anything material

I'm a London property owner who's pondered selling. Brexit will probably make a big difference but who knows how it's going to go just now. I'm going to sit it out and see but there could be a big fall with a no deal brexit. That said we survived WW1 and 2 so we'll survive a trade hiccup.

<comment><USER3> > we survived WW1 and 2 so we'll survive a trade hiccup.

I don't understand this reasoning. We didn't all survive WW1 and 2. If you mean the union survived - the Republic of Ireland left the union shortly after WW1. And if Brexit isn't _as bad_ as the Blitz, surely that could still mean it's pretty awful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> But JRM and other cronies are going to make a ton of money so of course they don't give a f [https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/jacob-rees-mogg- line-...](https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/jacob-rees-mogg-line-huge- personal-windfall-britain-exits-single-market/07/02/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Direct inward foreign investment experienced a large anomalous and record breaking peak in 2016, the year Brexit was essentially announced. The total size of this investment was almost half the FDI of the EU for that year. [1]

Provisional quarterly estimates suggest that the downward trend in net FDI earnings ended in 2017, recording the first annual increase since 2011. [2]

1: [https://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/wir2018_en.pdf](https://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/wir2018_en.pdf) (Annex, table 1) 2: [https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpay...](https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpayments/articles/ukforeigndirectinvestmenttrendsandanalysis/july2018)

</comment><comment><USER7> It's not just _uncertain_. The prospect of no-deal means an economic apocalypse in just over 4 months' time is a serious possibility.

<comment><USER8> No deal would be a _huge_ buying opportunity.

Even in the worst case scenario, the UK is almost certainly not going to collapse. I mean it's survived _way_ worse times.

It might take a beating, but it'll figure it out.

<comment><USER9> Bring on the good "almost certainly not going to collapse" times.

<comment><USER10> "When there's blood in the streets, buy property."

<comment><USER11> UK property prices rarely fall much the market just becomes illiquid for long periods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Uncertanty is the time for the best buying opportunities.

<comment><USER13> Sure, you can take a gamble and win. But you can also lose big. History shows that, lacking a crystal ball, you're more likely to lose than win.

So there's an opportunity for some investors to win big but most of them will lose. And even the ones that win will likely lose out on their next gamble. Such is the way of unstable markets.

<comment><USER14> > History shows that, lacking a crystal ball, you're more likely to lose than > win.

This is the opposite of what history shows. Markets have grown on average. Buy a varied assortment of assets, an index of British assets, you'll do fine. Just don't expect good quarters in the short term. You'll be up a lot in 10 or 20 years.

<comment><USER13> Yes if you average over the market you're likely to make money in the long term. Though note that in some cases long term can be on the order of two or more decades.

Buying into a risky market right before a down turn will only increase the time for you to see a return on your investment. Meanwhile you could have been making a "steady" income in less uncertain markets. Or even invested in the world market as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I remember well the discussions, here and elsewhere, from around the time of the referendum.

Next time I need some happy distraction I might just look up all the pro- Brexit commentators and rub it in there face how entirely spot-on the dire predictions back then actually where.

Too bad they are far too likely to be scavenging for food to indulge my gloating :(

<comment><USER16> More likely the "lead Brexiters" make a lot on the period high volatility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The markets hate uncertainty so the whole UK economy is wobbling on the edge of a cliff. The tory PM can't even be guaranteed to get the EU deal she is currently championing through Parliament as the backbenchers are revolting.

Only Labor can save Britain from collapse.

<comment><USER18> Reality check: in the big 4 western European economies (UK, France, Germany, Italy) the UK grew the most in Q3:

[https://order-order.com/2018/11/14/uk-top-big-four-eu- growth...](https://order-order.com/2018/11/14/uk-top-big-four-eu-growth- league/)

Italy was stagnant and Germany actually shrank!

EU supporters have been peddling this "UK is on the brink of total collapse" story for the last two years and yet the economy has continued to be one of the top performers in all of Europe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What a load of rubbish, Google and Amazon just announced in the past few months they are investing, they all know Brexit or no Brexit the UK is a highly desirable place for business.

<comment><USER20> > _Google and Amazon just announced in the past few months they are investing > [in the UK]_

Source?

<comment><USER19> [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-tech- sec...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-tech-sector- brexit-2017-investment-record-leave-eu-london-startups-a8143021.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Which ironically means that the GBP will probably go UP when a hard Brexit happens.

</comment><comment><USER22> >> lack of political clarity makes it very difficult to determine asset price movements

Q: Would "political clarity" _determine_ asset price movements?

<comment><USER23> Asset prices are composed of many things. Political clarity reduces one component, namely one kind of uncertainty. Uncertainty makes the computed asset price more uncertain. If a given asset is expected to have a value of £1m±10% in a year, reducing uncertainty makes the expected value £1m±5%.

Uncertaintly doesn't affect the headline number directly, but it does affect the ± part of the price price and complicate planning, and the reduced ability to plan may indirectly affect the headline number.

<comment><USER22> The OP wasn't talking about asset prices, but asset price _movements_.

That's awfully close to suggesting that one could predict the future price of assets, if only it wasn't for this pesky "political instability".

Surely not?

<comment><USER23> Asset price movements are basically x-y, where x and y are asset prices at two different times. If the uncertainty of x and y grows, then that of x-y grows even more.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tesla Roadster - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesla.com/roadster <comment><USER2> 620 mile range seems like a lot of battery weight for a performance car. Is that weight of batteries necessary to supply enough current and to reduce heat load on individual cells? Or would there be a smaller battery pack that would be even more performant due to reduced weight?

<comment><USER3> Theoretically, you could get more performance out of a smaller pack, the VW ID. R used just 43kWH to set the electric record at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. However, that's a lightweight race car. Tesla seemed to want to make this a really livable car with lots of superlative records so by using super light construction paired with a massive battery they can build a car with incredible range (This range would be a production car record.) but that same pack can handle incredible draw. I imagine this will be like a model S on crack: It won't handle fantastic but will have hilarious power.

Also, they claimed that it was using twin Model S packs in their design but were planning to move to a Model 3 evolution based pack. (The Model 3's pack is much more energy dense due to larger, better, specialized cells.)

<comment><USER4> There are tradeoffs around capacity, power, and longevity. I suspect Volkswagen doesn't care if the battery in their prototype racer is trashed after a year, so they can push it hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 620 Miles range?! that's huge! for an all electric car, and beats even a lot of gas-powered cars

<comment><USER6> You only get 620 miles if you drive it like a Yugo. ;)

Otherwise, if you do lots of hard starts and stops, you'll probably get about 400ish.

<comment><USER7> Is that really true? Electric cars should theoretically be able to handle rapid acceleration more efficiently than ICE vehicles, and regenerative breaking makes deceleration less wasteful as well. How much energy would really be wasted by pushing the vehicle to its limits?

<comment><USER8> Those efficiency curves are nonlinear - anything involving what is wanted and what is not wanted in thermodynamics generally is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So they unveiled it 2017, and now they are selling it? So now you can reserve. Hmm, maybe I missed it but when do you then actually get one? Is it the same thing like their other cars (i.e. when it is done)?

I am a bit confused about what is novel about this. It is not the unveiling, so it must be the reservation possibility but I might be wrong.

<comment><USER10> I just watched the video from the 2017 unveil and it says it will be available in 2020.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If that top speed ("Over 250 mph") is accurate wouldn't it put it in contention for "Production car speed record" per:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_car_speed_record](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_car_speed_record)

Additionally I hope nobody ever tries to "red line" it on a public road for their own and everyone else's safety. 4.2 sec 0-100 and a 250+ mph max is a very temping but potentially deadly combination.

Does anyone who owns a Tesla know if you can configure it to reduce the acceleration or artificially limit the top speed (e.g. "teenager mode" in other cars)?

<comment><USER12> At what performance point does a vehicle require specially designed tires? I assume you can't just put a set of Michelin Pilot Super Sports on this.

<comment><USER13> The Bugatti Veyron tires cost over $30k and last 2500 miles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> November 16, 2017

</comment><comment><USER15> The Lotus Evija looks better than this. But hey, that is a 1.5mil car.

The "250mph+" claim looks dubious given the shape/aero of this car - though I don't claim to be an expert and I suppose this might not be the finished shape of the car either.

<comment><USER16> Seems pretty aerodynamic to me. Can you point to a better shape?

<comment><USER17> Any other supercar; the parent posted one example.

<comment><USER16> The Lotus does not appear more aerodynamic than the Roadster. It has more "aggressive" features, but these do not improve aerodynamics and probably makes aerodynamics worse. The old Tesla roadster had a 0.31 drag coefficient (by the end of its run with Tesla's aero mods), Model S has 0.24, Model 3 has 0.23. I suspect the 2020 Roadster has better than the old Roadster, so somewhere between 0.30 and 0.20.

The large intakes of non-electric supercars also kills the drag coefficient.

The supercar Bugatti Veyron has a drag coefficient of 0.38.

So again, can you point to a more aerodynamic supercar? I'm not talking about subjective cosmetics (frankly, I find the cartoonishly "aggressive" features on lots of supercars a little childish), but objective aerodynamic performance?

<comment><USER15> The Tesla here looks like an early Lotus Elise/Exige in terms of body shape and size - sans a front intake. This type of shape was okay for the Elise/Exige because these weren't marketing a 250mph+ top speed or anywhere close. Indeed the short wheel base of these cars made them unsuited to those high speeds anyway. Which is another point - this Tesla seems to have a short wheel base also - which further makes me wonder about the 250+ claim.

I'm trying really hard not to take a dump on the Tesla though as I do like them. I'm sure they know more than me and that the info they've released is very early days and designed to generate interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Tesla social media team is particularly active this quarter.

</comment><comment><USER18> "The first supercar to set every performance record and still fit seating for four."

Where are the remaining two seats?

<comment><USER19> Let's be honest here, at $200k you've sold your first born anyway, so does it really matter?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What's the mile range at 250mph?

Also, that picture look cartoon-ish... I wonder if it was modified in any way?

<comment><USER4> You probably achieve the stated range at ~65MPH. Range decreases approximately with the square of the speed, so range at top speed would be around 16 times lower.

<comment><USER20> > You probably achieve the stated range at ~65MPH.

got a quote to back that up?

<comment><USER4> No, it comes from personal experience with Tesla's other cars.

Note that the listed range comes from a standardized EPA test cycle. It's more thorough than just cruising at 65MPH but the end result appears to approximate that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yes, please.

I've loved Tesla Roadsters since "Nash Bridges".

</comment><comment><USER22> The convertible roof STORES IN THE TRUNK? That is just an absurdly non- luxurious design decision.

<comment><USER23> Sports cars tend to be neither luxurious, comfortable nor practical.

One of the many reasons that I never understood why one would buy something like a new Lamborghini Huracan, when you for a similar price could be looking at a Rolls Royce Phantom.

<comment><USER24> Why would you buy a Rolls Royce Phantom? They're boring and don't hold their value.

<comment><USER23> Because it is far superior to any italian sports car on any parameter that matters outside of a track.

If you want a great car (we are of course ignoring fuel costs here), it is the most comfortable thing you'd ever park your buttocks in, and a much more well thought out vehicle. The usual Lamborghini or Ferrari would in comparison feel like a Peugeot 104 on a good day.

If you want to turn heads, this certainly does it better (although a Lamborghini or Ferrari is likely to get more attention from kids).

Sure, a Huracán has a faster 0-100, but if you want to enjoy the car outside of the track, it would be awful to drive in. Plus, it's still slower than a _much cheaper production sedan_ (Tesla Model S P100D Ludicrous). If you're not going to be the fastest _anyway_ , you might as well be the most comfortable.

None of these high-end vehicles hold their value anyway. Hell, there are really no new vehicles that hold their value. Only classics do.

<comment><USER24> You seem to be a bit out of touch. I'll leave it at that.

<comment><USER23> Each to their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I want one of those

</comment><comment><USER6> 0-60 in under 2 seconds is really dangerous!

</comment><comment><USER26> somebody get me a new shirt! ... And a new keyboard... . These are all covered in man drool... . I'd pour hot grits in my pants for one of these

</comment><comment><USER27> I call bullshit on this. 1000km range and 400km/h top speed?

Obviously you can't have both but each of this is unrealistic enough on its own.

You can't even go 400km/h on the Autobahn, which roads are they building this for?

And fully loaded SUVs like the Hyundai Kona get somewhat about 500km in normal crusing mode. 1000km is either a breakthrough in battery technology or measured/calculated when going 50km/h at best.

Unrealistic values imho, but I'm open to be proven otherwise.

<comment><USER4> Range is easy: just add more battery. It's expensive, but this is an expensive car.

<comment><USER27> But space and weight are limited on a supercar. So you have to choose one.

<comment><USER16> Not if you're battery-limited in performance. An ideal performance electric car is all battery and motor with the weight of everything else reduced as much as possible. That naturally means your battery will be way over-sized compared to a typical electric car.

Electric batteries are power-limited as well as energy-limited. So if you want more power, you need a bigger battery. (Alternate chemistries are also possible, but even then you reach a practical limit.)

The naive approach is to think of a battery like a gasoline tank, whose size and capacity you want to minimize if you're going for performance records. But really it's part of of the powertrain, and having a larger battery brings a bunch of other benefits like longer lifetime (in miles driven), charge & discharge speed (in kilowatts), higher thermal mass (can handle those big spurts of power that might temporarily exceed the cooling system's capacity), and higher electrical efficiency at a given discharge speed (a larger battery at a given voltage has lower internal resistance, thus less resistive losses and less heat generation).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Schizophrenia, Hubris and Science - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/02/01/schizophrenia-hubris-science/ <comment><USER3> I'm glad someone knowledgable on the topic has written about this.

When I saw the report, and then saw people I respect heralding it as a huge breakthrough, it seemed over-the-top.

But I'm no scientist or medical expert, and I'm bored of emotion-driven debates about medical science between myself and other scientific laypeople, so I kept my thoughts - and the results of my own hunt for further details - to myself.

But as the report says, evidence and details of genetic mechanisms in schizophrenia (and other mental and neurological disorders) are not new.

Sure this discovery may add some substance to the understanding of the topic, but it's not revolutionary.

The real revolution will be when science figures out exactly why and how _some_ people with a given genetic predisposition for an illness will develop that illness, whilst others do not.

As discussed in this article about the 2003 book _The Gene Illusion_ [1], the 50% rate of identitical twin concordance for schizophrenia is widely cited as evidence that it is a genetically deterministic condition.

But whether or not the figure is really 50% or something lower, that still leaves at least 50% room for non-genetic factors.

We'll only start making real progress in curing these kinds of illnesses when we form a deep understanding of whatever is going on in that very large component that we already know is not purely genetic.

[http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/joseph.html](http://human- nature.com/nibbs/03/joseph.html)

<comment><USER4> """ We'll only start making real progress in curing these kinds of illnesses when we form a deep understanding of whatever is going on in that very large component that we already know is not purely genetic. """

You have zero clue regarding what you are talking about. Your comment is just meaningless combination of platitudes. Even if we find a target and develop a drug that treats 20% of the cases, it still counts as a real progress if not a revolution. Look at the other comment in this thread by Chris Patil.

As you say in your "But I'm no scientist or medical expert", yes that's the reason why you find an obviously flawed blogpost appealing. Since the post was written/designed to make you feel better about your pessimism/skepticism.

This trend of "Contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism" is a sophisticated version of click-baiting where bloggers/commenters displaying classic case of dunning kruger spread FUD about any new discovery/result.

Commenters on Reddit/HN quickly lap up these articles/comments since it resonates with their sense of technological pessimism, often disguised as skepticism. As a result its now fashionable to criticize every new discovery/progress and get guaranteed pageviews/upvotes. It helps if its in form of a scary slideshow or contains assertions or scenarios that are not under question.

<comment><USER3> As I said, I'm bored of emotion-driven debates about medical science, but it's an important topic that I care deeply about so I'll engage.

Whilst I have no medical qualifications, my skin in the game is that I've experienced debilitating depression, anxiety and an apparent auto-immune fatigue illness for at least 15 years (but with evidence of the early stages of these conditions tracing well back into childhood), and I've witnessed people close to me succumb to other mental illnesses including schizophrenia and bipolar.

I desperately want all these illnesses cured.

In the absence of the medical profession's capacity to identify and treat my conditions, I've had to become "my own physician" and have spent much of the past 10 years researching the topic very deeply.

As a result, I've been able to find a system that seems to be succeeding in reversing these conditions. I've also been doing whatever I can (within a very limited budget and access to diagnostic facilities) to gather data that might demonstrate physiological changes - e.g, inflammation markers, antibodies for known chronic infections linked to auto-immunity, hormone levels.

My research and self-experimentation has given weight to the notion (which I derived from a number of medical researchers who have solid credentials but whom I suspect you'd find contemptible) that having a genetic predisposition for a chronic illness (which I seem to, given that other members of my family exhibit similar symptoms) doesn't necessarily condemn you to experiencing that illness, and that you can reverse or avoid the condition by altering your environment or your perception of your environment (I.e., epigenetics).

This is why I find it relevant to point out the data (<= 50% identical twin concordance) that indicates that the genetic predisposition is just that - <USER2> predisposition, not a sentence.

So when you say it would be major progress if this discovery led to the development of a drug that helped 20% of sufferers, I say sure, but wouldn't it be _more_ revolutionary if we could understand precicely why these genetic predispositions express in some people and not in others, then use this knowledge to develop techniques to resolve or prevent the illness in 100% of people?

I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts on that.

For what it's worth I think I'm the bigger optimist here. I think we are in a position to be able to cure many of society's most burdensome illnesses by understanding and addressing their environmental triggers. I believe that because I'm doing it myself with good success, and I believe the same kind of technique would be beneficial for other auto-immune illnesses, of which - according to this very research - schizophrenia is one.

Yes it needs a lot more validation and research, which is what I'm hoping to see, and am indeed doing what little I can to facilitate.

As a side note, your comment is quite personally abusive, which is against the HN guidelines. The guidelines seek to promote civility and substantiveness above all else.

This is a topic that is personally important to me and important to the world and is one I'm pleased to discuss at any opportunity with others who are knowledgeable and well-intentioned about advancing their understanding of it, and that can only happen when people are civil and respectful.

<comment><USER5> Since I lost password to above account, I am using a new account to reply.

First if you think my reply which merely pointed out that your remarks were meaningless or that you were unqualified (as you yourself pointed out) was "Abusive". You ought to re-read the article which is an open political attack, along with a photoshopped image mocking a researcher.

""" So when you say it would be major progress if this discovery led to the development of a drug that helped 20% of sufferers, I say sure, but wouldn't it be more revolutionary if we could understand precisely why these genetic predispositions express in some people and not in others, then use this knowledge to develop techniques to resolve or prevent the illness in 100% of people? """

The issue with such statements/questions E.g. "But wouldn't it be great if we could prevent cancer instead of curing it?" or "But it will be more awesome if achieve true AI instead of just some game benchmark" or "Wouldn't it be great if achieved faster than light space travel". Is that at best they are meaningless from point of view of scientific inquiry. They offer no benchmark, or even a reasonable plan of action. At worst they are often used to mislead from real scientific achievements.

Such statements are feel good equivalent of "World Peace!" or "End Hunger!" or "All you need is loveee!". While most users on this site would be able to quickly figure out the futility of "World Peace now" they don't recognize it when the similar statements are formulated in medical / healthcare domain.

To conclude this, what the researchers found regarding schizophrenia is awesome, they published in Nature, and as other comment points out most of the scientific community thinks its amazing if not revolutionary. There is no reason to dismiss it by quoting a politically motivated attack by some blogger and citing impossible to achieve goals without any feasible roadmap.

<comment><USER3> A few comments to round out the discussion...

\- The main reason I engage in discussions like this is to test how much of a "clue" I in fact have about these topics, and identify what gaps in my knowledge need to be filled. This one has been as valuable as any in that regard. (FWIW I found Chris Patil's response to the post most insightful, as well as researcher Kevin Mitchell's followup comment.)

\- It's untrue, your implication that pointing out the importance of the non- genetic component in the development of illness is a pointless diversion. There are compelling hypotheses around this (some going back decades) and promising studies in this area [1]. Yet they are often marginalised or contemptuously dismissed by the segment of the scientific community that remains fixated on genetic determinism (e.g., Richard Dawkins' recent public attacks on epigenetics - based not on any evidence but on his own ideology and ego). The point is that there could be much more progress in resolving these illnesses if researchers/institutions were less focused on fanning their own egos with over-the-top claims, less constrained by the existing commercial model for medicine (we can use this to make new drugs!), and more open to other researchers' insights and discoveries that could help to complete the whole picture.

\- It's no big deal to me as I can handle it, but you were abusive in a way that is outside HN guidelines. Your perception of the tone of the original article doesn't change that. When I couched my comments with "I'm no expert", as a point of modesty and a disclaimer, that didn't warrant such a confrontational assertion as "You have zero clue regarding what you are talking about", followed up with a string of accusations that seem to be grounded in your own grievances with other people who engage in this topic, but were not evident in anything I wrote myself. Like I said, I can handle it, but if you make a habit of that style of commenting, you may attract the attention of the mods and other participants who value HN as a place where people treat each other with politeness and respect (HN is very deliberately not Reddit).

\- HN has a password recovery feature FYI. And you can email the mods at firstname.lastname@example.com for help with this or any other aspect of the site.

Thanks for the discussion.

[1] Prominent researchers and advocates in this area include Harvard medical professor Rudy Tanzi, former Stanford researcher Bruce Lipton, and general physician Lissa Rankin. I comfortably concede they all suffer the propensity to align themselves too much with the new age woo industry - though that is partly due to their banishment from the scientific mainstream for having non- conformist ideas that question genetic determinism (Lipton in particular). FYI My personal quest is to gather hard data as I apply their hypotheses in an attempt to completely cure my own illnesses, then work with professional researchers to investigate these hypotheses more widely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ugh. I don't understand all this recent Broad/Lander vitriol. You can ask pretty much anyone in the field and they'll all say the work was a tour de force (see first comment in the article for instance). Focusing on the press release wording misses the point imo.

<comment><USER7> There's a lot of professional and personal acrimony toward Lander dating back at least to the Human Genome Project. I don't know if this is just a continuation of that, but throughout the late '00s it was surprising to hear the venom his rivals were eager to dish out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The top comment by Chris Patil gives an important counterpoint:

\---

Neuroskeptic's "shoulders of giants" metaphor betrays an astonishing ignorance of the state of despair around translational psychiatry, and the blogger completely misses the boat on the importance of these findings. If the purpose of this blog post was to argue for a more reserved tone in scientific press releases, and support that view by challenging the significance of a study described in such a release, the blogger made an absolutely awful decision in their choice of which paper to make an example of.

Drugs used to treat schizophrenia today have the same molecular mechanism as compounds discovered serendipitously 60 years ago. In the intervening time we've seen no innovative drugs, and no new biomarkers — a sad lack of progress at a time when we've made enormous progress in treatment of cancer and cardiovascular disease. At the same time, pharma companies have exited neuropsychiatry in droves – despite enormous unmet need – citing lack of scientific foundations.

Because, see, drug developers don't just just count Google Scholar hit results; they need to have a real understanding of mechanism with a solid experimental basis. Neuroskeptic's abstract-counting seems to imply that every paper in PubMed reflects a major advance, but this confuses quantity with quality. Others feel that the view from the "shoulders of giants" is not especially clear. While it's true that thousands of papers about schizophrenia have been published, many of them followed false leads, described failed animal "models", or told genetic 'just-so' stories.

The Sekar et al. discovery in Nature connected the human genome's largest influence on risk of schizophrenia with a molecular mechanism that would explain the age of onset and major pathological observations. That's a major advance. Many others (including NIMH Director Cuthbert, and well-known GWAS skeptic David Goldstein) also called it a major advance (e.g., see Goldstein's News and Views in Nature.)

I agree with them. Given that this paper not only points the way toward a novel risk gene but provides convincing evidence of molecular mechanism, it should be considered an unprecedented advance. (Unless the blogger feels like well-studied, potentially druggable pathways have been implicated by recent work on this disease; if so, they were not mentioned in the original post).

The press release doesn't say that Sekar et al identified the "first schizophrenia risk gene", but rather that it was "the first time that the origin of this devastating psychiatric disease has been causally linked to specific gene variants _AND_ a biological process" [emphasis mine]. This isn't just another lab reporting a locus identified in GWAS. Instead, this is a situation in which a team of (very) clever geneticists analyzed a (very hard to analyze) set of genetic variants and then showed that the protein encoded by the risk allele has a molecular activity pertinent to an established (but heretofore unexplained) disease phenotype. This paper is an interdisciplinary tour de force, and it is philistine to detract from the magnitude of the authors' achievement in the service of quibbling about the tone of a press release. In any case, the basic claim of that release is true: Literally no one else has published research like this.

Beyond that, I'm puzzled by the implication that major advances in an extensively studied field are less important because they confirm (or deny) widely discussed models. In any event, hypotheses are different from experimental confirmation. The idea that excessive synaptic pruning is involved in schizophrenia has indeed been discussed in many papers (although most of those 3000+ mentions are one-liners and asides that cite a handful of originating papers).

Pardon my caps, but THAT IS EXACTLY WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT. The idea that SCZ could involve excessive synaptic pruning is so provocative and exciting that thousands of authors have decided to mention it in their papers, but before Sekar et al, we had no idea about the underlying molecular mechanism. Now we have not just a candidate mechanism, but one that unifies a great many disparate findings and points the way toward both further genetic research and rational design of therapeutics.

The Internet makes it easy for us to nip at the ankles of giants, especially from behind the cover of a pseudonym, and lately it's been fashionable to pile on Eric Lander for doing basically what any chair is supposed to do: popularize the work of scientists affiliated with his institution. Also, granted, press releases could be toned down. But this paper is the wrong place to plant that flag; this is the wrong hill to die on. This paper is gigantic, and it's easy for me to see how it could go down in history as a turning point in what was once a hopeless battle.

<comment><USER9> There's also Neuroskeptic's hilarious argument:

> As for the "excessive synaptic pruning" model, it's very far from new: it > was proposed in 1983 and has since been discussed in 3580 papers. So it's > simply untrue to imply that Sekar et al. are the first to shine light into a > biological "black box"

Yeah, people have been running their mouths for a century proposing hundreds of radically different schizophrenia theories. It's different to propose yet another one, and to show that one out of the hundreds is genuinely part of schizophrenia!

Contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> To me it seems the scale of the study actually "proves" something. Are there other studies that "prove" the biological factors involved in schizophrenia?</comment>


Launch Applications from Terminal in OS X - <AUTHOR> http://macdevelopertips.com/system/launch-applications-from-terminal.html <comment><USER2> Best 'open' tip, use '-a' to specify the application, even without a file or location (e.g. 'open -a Firefox').</comment>


Ask HN: How far in advance should pre-orders charge me in advance for? - <AUTHOR>

Recently I preordered an item which had a successful kickstarter campaign (the pre-order opened after the campaign).
My credit card recently got charged in late July, but now the product is slipping to being shipped Feb 2015ish.
How long typically should a credit card be charged in advance for a preorder? <comment><USER2> Couple of months of is reasonable but it depends on the amount.</comment>


Ludicrous Patent of the Week: Rectangles on a Computer Screen - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/30/us_grants_patent_for_shapes_on_a_screen/ <comment><USER2> This is a design patent so it is more limited than a business method patent that software usually falls under.</comment>


A curated list for Kubernetes sources - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ramitsurana/awesome-kubernetes <comment><USER2> Is there a way to learn kubernetes in a short time, or in a way that you can primarily use a GUI to interact with it? Also why are there are so many distributions of it?

<comment><USER3> Kubernetes is a robot made of cats. Not robotic cats like Voltron. Actual, you know. Cats.

You can learn the basics in a week. It will take a very very long time to learn to be comfortable in it.

Kubernetes The Hard Way is the usual answer to "how do I learn this?"

<comment><USER4> This is unfortunately and hilariously accurate.

It's a great system in a lot of ways, but it sure has lots of quirks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ISTIO has been a good Kubernetes service mesh for a project I've been working on, and has been the hardest part to tie down though. So many obscure settings and hard-to-track-down information, especially in a sea of options and possible configurations.

Since our SSL is terminated in AWS our cluster was treating things as mostly "HTTP" internally and TLS-redirect HTTP->HTTPS wasn't working and other ISTIO redirects were returning HTTP when original context was HTTPS. It took lots of reading and digging through posts to find references to an "externalTrafficPolicy" setting that was crucial to fixing the problem. That was the most painful k8s/ISTIO thing that came up.

<comment><USER6> What version of istio? mTLS was a big pain point at my place until 1.14 which now has has "auto mtls": [https://archive.istio.io/v1.4/docs/tasks/security/authentica...](https://archive.istio.io/v1.4/docs/tasks/security/authentication/auto- mtls/)

It really depends on your security posture. We wanted traffic between services within the service mesh to be encrypted too.

</comment></comment><comment> globular-toast This is curated? I look at "starting points" and still can't see the wood for the trees. And I'm far from a beginner since I've been doing the whole container thing for several years now.

<comment><USER7> Yes I think the mods should rename this to something more general like "List of kubernetes resources." The awesome-* lists are not "curated" but rather a dumping ground of links one or two edges away from the core theme.

Curation in the context of Kubernetes is even more laughable because the community is a dumping ground of projects all trying to solve the same problems in slightly different ways. The CNCF Landscape is probably my favorite example of this. I don't think they've ever seen a project they didn't like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess if you're larping as Google it helps to have a list of the lore.

I prefer to stick to the Unix Canon myself.

</comment><comment><USER9> That drives home the cambrian explosion happening in the k8s world.

</comment><comment><USER10> Kubernetes is a software varnish how a puppet master thinks how puppets should behave. Thing is, the puppets turn out to be almost humans and are a big heap of undeterministic behavior. But hey it is all in a sandbox so you can try and try again forever. It is like an avoid work machinery creating endless work and fun. It doesn't really matter... as an achievement.</comment>


Counting push-ups can help predict your risk of heart disease - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1552549/counting-push-ups-can-help-predict-your-risk-of-heart-disease/ <comment><USER2> Discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19181356](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19181356)</comment>


Dan Gilbert confirms he's trying to get Amazon to build its second HQ in Detroit - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/07/dan-gilbert-confirms-hes-trying-to-get-amazon-to-build-its-second-hq-in-detroit <comment><USER2> I hope Detroit gets it. Metro Detroit would be just perfect for it. It's on the East Coast. It has ridiculous transport infrastructure. There is a ton of cheap labor nearby. They can probably acquire an absolutely massive plot of land downtown for pennies on the dollar.</comment>


Unity and Flash : a sneak peek. - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/09/01/unity-and-flash-a-sneak-peek/ <comment><USER2> I keep expecting to hear any day now that Adobe has purchased Unity. Their ideas behind content creation and authoring are really in line with each other, and 3D content creation is sorely lacking in the Adobe lineup.

<comment><USER3> Very good point - that would make perfect sense. It would fill a big hole in the Flash developer tools, and if Unity were refocused to Flash, it would give Flash a huge boost: Get all those Unity developers working on Flash, indirectly at first, but they would eventually write the UI for their games in Flash and so forth. And it would make them less likely to use other game platforms.

I would be happier if Unity exported to HTML5, and I assume that would be unlikely if Adobe bought Unity. But from Adobe's perspective buying Unity would be the right thing to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm definitely impressed, I don't think I've seen a Flash game that looks as good.

I honestly don't know much about Unity or the technology but my first concern is performance. Adobe tried the "write once, run everywhere" and while they were successful, performance suffered. How will something much more complex and demanding perform?

<comment> matthew-wegner The performance answer is a tricky one. Unity maintains their own web player plugin, which runs with native performance: <http://unity3d.com/webplayer/>

My guess is big players--Battlestar Galactica Online, Tiger Woods Online--will use the Flash player export as a fallback. Depending on its shipping performance, and how demanding the content is, developers may even fork the content for each player individually. Regardless of multiple versions of content, it would probably make sense to push users into downloading the Unity Web Player for better performance.

Unity is also working on a NaCl port. In a year, 3D web game developers may be able to offer the Unity/Flash/NaCl versions simultaneously (prioritized by browser/performance/compatibility).

In general, Unity is well-positioned to exploit other platforms as they emerge. If they can manage this Flash export, they can probably manage anything...

[Full disclosure: I'm a long-time Unity user, and I help them organize proposals/sessions for their Unite conference, but I don't actually work _at_ Unity]

<comment> matthew-wegner Also, it's worth mentioning Unity has a graphical profiler, which you can connect to a build running on iOS/web/standalone: [http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Profiler.htm...](http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Profiler.html)

I'm not sure if that's possible on Flash or not, but if so it'd be easier to bring your performance up to the platform limitations...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What I would like to see is Unity being able to export to HTML5. In principle this should be possible using Emscripten/Mandreel/etc. Performance should be comparable to Flash on modern browsers (unless they have some special optimizations for the Flash VM they are working on with Adobe).

One issue is the lack of multithreading with shared state in JavaScript. I'm not sure if Flash supports that? In any case I assume something like Unity should be able to be ported to such a platform (you can still do multithreading using workers, but you must use message passing).

Anyone know if they are working on that?

<comment><USER5> I'd love to see this, but WebGL is such a mess right now, my PC can hardly handle even simple stuff in it. It's just not ready yet. The average user can't get the same performance from HTML/Canvas/WebGL as they can with Flash/Molehill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not having used Unity before, I wondered how it compared to WebGL. It seems as though Unity provides it's own 3D framework to make authoring much simpler:

        It has built in character controllers, water simulation, particles, a physics engine and more.
        It takes a fraction of the time to make a game in Unity as it would do in Molehill [Flash] or WebGL.

From [http://sebleedelisle.com/2011/06/webgl-and-molehill-an- overv...](http://sebleedelisle.com/2011/06/webgl-and-molehill-an-overview-of- in-browser-gpu-3d/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone get this to work? I tried on multiple computers and I just get a time out.

<comment><USER8> Same here. I'm in India and tried it on two ISPs.

<comment><USER9> Were back up, sorry about that, looks like all the traffic burned the blog webserver

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nail in the coffin.

<comment><USER11> Whose coffin?</comment></comment>


CPAN is 20 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.perl.org/users/neilb/2015/08/cpan-is-20.html

<comment><USER2> CPAN is an awesome tool. First, this is a good way to avoid to reinvent the wheel. Second, it's companion, CpanTesters community platform, gives to the authors a damn simple way to test their modules on a huge variety of OS and architectures. These tests are public and will help people to choose distributions according to their needs and quality exigences. Third, it encourage to test and upload modules at early stages of the development: it makes possible to simplify the development process by retrieving test results, and be sure the modules will be usable on various OS, even if they are quite old or uncommon. It's almost disappointing sometimes how for any task you need to achieve, each time there is an existing module ready to be _use_.

<comment><USER3> Seems to me that CPAN would still have a ton of things to teach to new repositories but seems few people look at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A good time to acknowledge that CPAN was a very influential example for internet libraries that came afterward.

I got a lot out of it for years, time to say thanks! You guys in the Perl community were awesome and still are!

A shout out to CTAN too!

<comment><USER5> To be honest, it still is. Many of the other ones have yet to catch up with CPAN in terms of richness in eco system and breadth of offered features.

For example, i know no (and i may be ignorant) language that has a distributed library testing community.

<comment><USER6> I was unaware of the distributed library testing community. How does it work, pray tell?

<comment><USER7> Volunteers with lots of different perl versions and OSes run software that monitors CPAN for new uploads, and then automatically downloads them and runs their automated tests, and uploads the results.

Here's more on CPANTesters: [http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/WhatIsCPANTesters](http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/WhatIsCPANTesters)

And here's an example of the results for a popular module: [http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Moose+2.1600](http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Moose+2.1600)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For libraries:

in Perl : there is really one way to do it, use CPAN.

in Python : there's more than one way to do it : pth, eggs, setuptools, pip, wheel, distutils, easy_install,...

[http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/6/22/hate-hate-hate- everywhere/](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/6/22/hate-hate-hate-everywhere/)

<comment><USER9> > in Python : there's more than one way to do it : pth, eggs, setuptools, pip, > wheel, distutils, easy_install,...

> pip, wheel

Package formats: egg, wheel

Packaging/Install libraries: setuptools (incl. easy_install), pip, distutils

Install method: pth

It looks less daunting when you don't make every item look like a replacement for itself. I notice that under Perl you don't list ".tar.gz" ".tgz" ".tar.bz2" and ".tar.xz" in the list of "ways to do it."

Also:

* Wheels are (at least officially) considered the way forward. Support for other formats is legacy. Yes, this is less ideal than keeping a simple package format for 20 some odd years, but Python also really didn't take off in popularity until ~2002 despite being almost as old as Perl. Also, it makes sense to improve the state of things when necessary (e.g. creating wheels vs. sticking with eggs) rather than doing nothing.

* distutils was a fork of setuptools that has since been merged back into setuptools. Counting it twice doesn't speak to the current state of things.

* easy_install is the installation command that is _part_ of the setuptools package, so including it in the list is counting the same thing twice. (I'll notice that you didn't include any CPAN wrappers as "different ways to do it.")

> in Perl : there is really one way to do it, use CPAN.

[http://search.cpan.org/~miyagawa/App- cpanminus-1.7039/bin/cp...](http://search.cpan.org/~miyagawa/App- cpanminus-1.7039/bin/cpanm)

[https://github.com/chromatic/CPAN-Dark](https://github.com/chromatic/CPAN- Dark)

[http://search.cpan.org/~jhthorsen/App-git- ship-0.19/lib/App/...](http://search.cpan.org/~jhthorsen/App-git- ship-0.19/lib/App/git/ship/perl.pm)

[http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1028999](http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1028999)

[http://search.cpan.org/~sunnavy/Shipwright-2.4.41/lib/Shipwr...](http://search.cpan.org/~sunnavy/Shipwright-2.4.41/lib/Shipwright.pm)

[http://perlbrew.pl/](http://perlbrew.pl/)

<comment><USER10> `easy_install` is not a library per se, it's a binary offered by setuptools.

> distutils was a fork of setuptools

This is incorrect. Setuptools is an extension of distutils (it patches and extends distutils to have additional functionality). Distribute was a fork of Setuptools that has been merged back into Setuptools.

Also, `pth` is not a installation method - it's merely a way to customize the import system. It's a very scary feature as it allows one to execute arbitrary code (that can reside in the `.pth` file) when import paths are being set up (when the `site` module is being initialized).

<comment><USER9> > `easy_install` is not a library per se, it's a binary offered by setuptools.

I thought that I clarified that in my post, but if you could tell me what was confusing, I'll use that to inform future discussions I have on this.

> This is incorrect. Setuptools is an extension of distutils (it patches and > extends distutils to have additional functionality). Distribute was a fork > of Setuptools that has been merged back into Setuptools.

Correct, and one reason why the landscape has been confusing for a while (confusion between distutils/setuptools/distribute). Thankfully distribute has been merged back into setuptools.

> Also, `pth` is not a installation method

You're right. It's a way to customize the import system, but it's "main" usage in the wild is during installation/setup. The main place that I've seen it used is with easy_install + eggs (IIRC).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it was the first better done package managers. Saved the problem of installing modules on cross platforms. Most of the time it works without a hiccup. For a perl developer CPAN is a friend.

</comment><comment><USER12> Congratulations! I recall when it debuted and it was a huge accomplishment. 20 years onward and it's still a huge accomplishment, especially testing on so many systems. Thank you to all the maintainers!

</comment><comment><USER13> My experience from a decade ago was different than most here, I had not so much luck with CPAN.

Many libraries and projects, but most of them alpha or abandoned. It took a lot of time to find stuff that was built well enough for production and was still maintained.

<comment><USER5> What exactly were you looking for? Which libraries did you find that were alpha or abandoned?

It's highly likely that your experience was simply due to the problem domain you were looking at. If i were to look at something i work with, 3d graphics, my results would look much the same as what you said.

That doesn't mean all of CPAN's like that though.

<comment><USER13> Web development.

<comment><USER5> At that time CGI::Application was way out of alpha and actively maintained.

<comment><USER13> I prefer using libaries instead of developing everything on my own, so usually I use 10-20 libraries for a project beyond a web framework, e.g. credit card management, HTTP library,.... YMMV and if a web framework is all you need, hurray to you.

<comment><USER5> I asked for "What exactly were you looking for? Which libraries did you find that were alpha or abandoned?"

You only said "Web development."

Now you're addressing completely different problem domains, so if you don't like my answer, than that is because your initial answer to my question wasn't very clear. Were my questions unclear?

<comment><USER13> Not sure why you agressivly attack me.

But sorry. This was more than a decade ago, I've done dozens and dozens of projects since then with Java, C, Ruby, Python, Clojure, Scala, Javascript, Coffescript and Typescript and more, so I can't remember 'exactly' what libaries I was using more than 10 years ago in some Perl projects.

"Now you're addressing completely different"

I beg to differ, in my book credit card processing during e-commerce checkou and accessing backend services with HTTP are in the problem domain of 'web development', but it might be different for your 'web applications'.

<comment><USER5> I'm not attacking, i'm trying to figure out your case, because i occasionally hear people voicing a sentiment as in your original post, but _never_ with actual detail. I'm just curious and wish to know more about this. :)

And sure, i didn't really expect you to remember what you did find. But while your response of "web development" does include credit card and http stuff, it only does so roughly. Many many web apps don't use either.

That said, at that time both LWP and Business::CreditCard were in what looks like sensible states: [https://metacpan.org/release/GAAS/libwww- perl-5.803](https://metacpan.org/release/GAAS/libwww-perl-5.803) [https://metacpan.org/release/IVAN/Business- CreditCard-0.28](https://metacpan.org/release/IVAN/Business-CreditCard-0.28)

Did the search interface at the time not surface them for you, or were they incompatible with what you were trying to do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are there package formats older than CPAN? Which is the oldest one?

I did some digging and it seems that RPM, DEB etc were created after 1993 so perhaps CPAN could be father of packaging formats.

<comment><USER15> CPAN was also created after 1993, hence it being 20 years old :p

I don't know when the Debian package format was first created, but dpkg was rewritten in C back in '94[1], so it would predate CPAN. However the real genius of package managers is dependency resolution and the central software repositories - both of which likely came a little while after dpkg. I'd be interested to read more on the history of Debian's package management though - if anyone does find a reference.

[1] [https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/dpkg/dpkg.git/plain/main/mai...](https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/dpkg/dpkg.git/plain/main/main.c?id=1b80fb16c22db72457d7a456ffbf1f70a8dfc0a5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How old is metacpan, the site that makes cpan useful?

<comment><USER2> According to their about page, it is 5 years old.

 _We are a relatively young open source project. In November 2015, MetaCPAN will be 5 years old. It 's old enough to have become an important and well utilized part of the Perl world, but it's also young enough to have lots of room to evolve. As you will see we have many ideas and encourage more suggestions._

<comment><USER17> Yep, that's correct. I still remember when I registered the name. It has grown far beyond anything I had imagined.

The whole CPAN ecosystem (CPAN, CPAN Testers, search.cpan.org, metacpan.org etc) involves a lot of people and a lot of resources. It's not just open source software -- it's open source "software as a service". So you get to push some code and also worry about uptime!

Lots of volunteers and more than a few sponsors make sure the ecosystem keeps on ticking. My thanks to all of them. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have used CPAN for years, its amazing. I finally gave back three years ago, and I contributed a module.

</comment><comment><USER19> When a language dies an entire knowledge base is lost. I hope this won't be perl's fate.

</comment><comment><USER20> who else read it as CSPAN?</comment>


Screen lets people see in front of the truck to pass safely - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/98qtam/this_screen_lets_people_see_in_front_of_the_truck/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.samsung.com/global/the-safety-truck-could- revol...](https://news.samsung.com/global/the-safety-truck-could- revolutionize-road-safety)</comment>


Spacex's reused first stage launches successfully - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/30/spacex_reused_rocket_performs_perfectly/ <comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't seen any discussion or mention on HN. This is an important milestone in increasing the availability of space, both for commercial and human ventures, and possibly for extraglobal habitation in the future.

I found the WaitButWhy series on Musk and his companies to be interesting and enlightening (as someone with no aerospace background):

Part 1: [http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds- raddest-m...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest- man.html)

The SpaceX post (part 3): [http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex- will-coloni...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will- colonize-mars.html)

Additional SpaceX post: [http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking- rocket-the-f...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the- full-story.html)

Edit: line breaks for links.

<comment><USER2> It is a _stunning_ achievement, absolutely amazing. Unsurprisingly it has, in fact, been discussed here on HN. Did you use the search box and do a search for "SpaceX" ??

Anyway, there's this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999521) (101 comments)

And this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999378) (354 comments)

These remaining ones don't have any discussion, and some are talking about landing the fairing, others are links to the live broadcast, but they are all related to this most recent launch:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14042309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14042309)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14012029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14012029)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14010350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14010350)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14004243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14004243)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002565)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002488)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999518)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999511](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999511)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999260](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999260)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999132)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999131](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999131)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999127)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999122)</comment></comment>


Psychiatry Admits It's Been Wrong in Big Ways, But Can It Change? - <AUTHOR> http://www.madinamerica.com/2014/03/psychiatry-admits-wrong-big-ways-can-change-chat-robert-whitaker/ <comment><USER2> "[The lie supporting the chemical imbalance theory] is an astonishing betrayal of the trust that the public puts in a medical discipline; we don't expect to be misled in such a basic way."

It's more than just being misled. These lies and misinformation by the psychiatric industry have destroyed millions of lives and killed countless people. And _still_ they are being perpetrated. It's _fucking outrageous_!

<comment><USER3> The problem is that we have cultures which perpetuate the myths being used to sell them expensive drugs, precisely because these cultures are using these drugs - and _like using them_. So, in spite of the lies, the Pharmaceutical industry continues to rake in record profits; because it has created a product that people _want_.

Never mind that a pharmaceutical subscription is a chain in the contemporary slavery link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always wondered how medicine as a whole figured out things that don't lend themselves to clinical trials - how are you going to measure the success of different approaches to psychological counseling?</comment>


Biohacker fined for travel card implant - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43428003 <comment><AUTHOR> From their terms and conditions:

 _8: Property of TfNSW: Opal Cards are and remain our property. We may inspect, de-activate or take possession of an Opal Card or require its return at our discretion without notice at any time._

Found via [https://www.opal.com.au/en/footer/opal-terms-of- use](https://www.opal.com.au/en/footer/opal-terms-of-use)

I would guess that removing the chip and implanting it makes it difficult to return on demand, and thus violates their Ts and Cs.</comment>